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Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Robots
12 years ago
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There is something that is very interesting about our near future. Isac Asimov dictates a set timeline from the early 2000s through 20,000. In the early 2000s he tells of the advancement of robotics to the point of sentience. Moore's Law states that every two years the number of transistors on a processor will double, therefore doubling it's processing power. Since Intel's founding this law has held true. According to this you would think that robots are only a few years away. Unfortunately that is not the whole case.
In 2009 IBM attempted to replicate the synapses in the brain. They're computer had something around 9 million synapse like computing paths. It took a large space to house all the processing power of this computer and it was equivalent to the brain of a fish. According to this we'll have to wait years and years for robots. Again, that may not be the case.
Modern computer processors are made out of silicon. Silicon is a transition element giving it the properties of a metal and nonmetal. Silicon allows the millions and millions of transistors on a processor to turn on and off thus processing information. The problem with silicon is that it will eventually dissipate. To solve this issue, Intel has begun research into creating graphite transistors. Graphite solves the abundance problem that silicon gives. Graphite transistors are one way we can lead into supercomputing robots. It is these exotic materials that will provide us with faster processing in a smaller package.
The next step is the design of transistors. For reference, the current Intel transistor is about half the width of a single strand of DNA. They are very tiny. Due to their size Intel can fit about 731,000,000 onto the latest Core i7 chip. That is a lot, but the Core i7 still can't think freely. So, what if we took the 2D transistor and bring it into the third dimension? Quite a lot. With tri-gate transistors you effectively triple the transistor count on a processor. That's going from 731,000,000 to 534,361,000,000. Now that's a great amount of processing power. It's also a great leap towards creating a thinking processor.
Having five hundred billion transistors creates a vastly powerful processor, but that's not how the brain works. Synapses work by stimulating each other and that sends signals to their destination. That is thinking. Like I mentioned earlier IBM has created a computer that is capable of imitating a brain, so we're on the track towards a thinking processor that is equivalent to, or maybe even faster than a human.
While the reality may be that we won't see human like thinking robots until the late 2000s or early 2100s we can still take comfort in all the advancements that the road to robotics will give us. While today's processors don't nearly have the processing power of a human brain, in twenty years they may have slightly comparable processing power. The advancement of computers means the advancement of human thinking in general. It will give us great leaps in medicine, engineering, and life itself. So, while human robots are still a ways off, we still get many presents along the way.
In 2009 IBM attempted to replicate the synapses in the brain. They're computer had something around 9 million synapse like computing paths. It took a large space to house all the processing power of this computer and it was equivalent to the brain of a fish. According to this we'll have to wait years and years for robots. Again, that may not be the case.
Modern computer processors are made out of silicon. Silicon is a transition element giving it the properties of a metal and nonmetal. Silicon allows the millions and millions of transistors on a processor to turn on and off thus processing information. The problem with silicon is that it will eventually dissipate. To solve this issue, Intel has begun research into creating graphite transistors. Graphite solves the abundance problem that silicon gives. Graphite transistors are one way we can lead into supercomputing robots. It is these exotic materials that will provide us with faster processing in a smaller package.
The next step is the design of transistors. For reference, the current Intel transistor is about half the width of a single strand of DNA. They are very tiny. Due to their size Intel can fit about 731,000,000 onto the latest Core i7 chip. That is a lot, but the Core i7 still can't think freely. So, what if we took the 2D transistor and bring it into the third dimension? Quite a lot. With tri-gate transistors you effectively triple the transistor count on a processor. That's going from 731,000,000 to 534,361,000,000. Now that's a great amount of processing power. It's also a great leap towards creating a thinking processor.
Having five hundred billion transistors creates a vastly powerful processor, but that's not how the brain works. Synapses work by stimulating each other and that sends signals to their destination. That is thinking. Like I mentioned earlier IBM has created a computer that is capable of imitating a brain, so we're on the track towards a thinking processor that is equivalent to, or maybe even faster than a human.
While the reality may be that we won't see human like thinking robots until the late 2000s or early 2100s we can still take comfort in all the advancements that the road to robotics will give us. While today's processors don't nearly have the processing power of a human brain, in twenty years they may have slightly comparable processing power. The advancement of computers means the advancement of human thinking in general. It will give us great leaps in medicine, engineering, and life itself. So, while human robots are still a ways off, we still get many presents along the way.
